Protein Farmer

Stella Matutina Farm

As I go about my days of farming, I often pore over ideas, images, or lyrics from my experience as I execute my various tasks, whether I’m moving an electric fence, seeding daikon (as I did this week), weeding, or what have you. It’s more reverie than anything: not completely deliberate, and not completely random. Somewhere in between. Lately, besides the English ballad “Tam Lin” (which you can check out here in a rendition by the very talented Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer) and the Anglican hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (which hear in this jangly version by the delightful Rain for Roots), I’ve been ruminating on the scene in Blade Runner 2049 in which the replicant Detective K (played by Ryan Gosling) confronts and arrests the replicant Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista). Morton, a former military grade replicant, is at that point a “protein farmer,” that is, a farmer raising insects for their highly nutritious larvae. Yum.

There is no accident why this image has invaded my pastoral meditations. The Corporate-Governmental Archons have been in full publicity mode, enlisting celebrities from Nicole Kidman to Angelina Jolie to promote the wonderful possibilities of introducing insects into the Western diet as a replacement for those environment-destroying cattle, pigs, and chickens. The New York Times, ever at the vanguard of the bequests of the Archons, even ran a story recently arguing that the taboo against cannibalism may have been an overreaction. My God.

Apparently, this move is supposed to be “environmentally friendly.” Well, I call “bullshit.” Jettisoning husbandry in favor of an animal-free agriculture is the way of death. As any biodynamic farmer could tell you, animals belong on a farm and contribute to the fecundity of everything—the plants and soil as well as the wild creatures (including insects) in the meadows, woods, and waters, not to mention people. Certainly, factory farming is antithetical to this fecundity, but the agricultural project of Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and their minions (talk about a “basket of deplorables”!) is just as toxic and even more demonic. The Netherlands’ Mark Rutte and Cananda’s Justin Trudeau (and what the hell, pray tell, is really going on behind the Maple Curtain?) are all in on the globalist agro-scam, hiding behind a nitrogen emissions reduction fig leaf. Sustainable farming is not what they are promoting: they are promoting a continued power grab that went into high gear in early 2020 when the greatest wealth transfer in history began in earnest and corporations capitalized (the exact word) on societal anxieties and destroyed and plundered millions of small businesses with the help of their bureaucratic henchmen in governments around the world (but particularly in the West). Again, as any decent organic or biodynamic farmer knows, transitioning to these sustainable methods from conventional ways of working takes time, 7-10 years according to Vandana Shiva, so going cold turkey, as happened recently (and tragically) in Sri Lanka, can have very predictably disastrous results. Guess what: the Archons know this. Also guess what: it’s what they want. In theology we call such entities demons.

Besides vegetables, we raise a decent amount of protein on our farm. Though veggies are part of our CSA, we mostly raise meat for ourselves—including beef, lamb, pork, chicken, duck, and goose. To that we supplement our diet in winter with venison and rabbit. Humans, some might be surprised to learn, are also part of the circle of life. We do, however, offer eggs for sale and the possibility for a share in our dairy production. Our little Jersey cow, Fiona, gives about 3 gallons of milk a day on average (more when she freshens) and even when all nine kids were at home this would have been more than we could handle. Now with only four still at home... you get it. We make various cheeses (I made some queso blanco and ricotta this morning), butter, yogurt, ice cream, kefir and so forth, and milk proteins are a great staple of the diet. We also have insects on our farm, foremost among them our honeybees. But we don’t eat them.

Interesting that this all occurred to me the week of Lammas and the Transfiguration, two feasts that mark the beginning of the first fruits and harvest cycle. Today, for example, just before the blessing of fruits (in our case, grapes, cucumber, zucchini, peppers, onions, and tomatoes) in observance of Transfiguration during house church, we read these lines from “The blessing of the straun” found in the Carmina Gadelica:

Each meal beneath my roof,

They will all be mixed together,

In name of God the Son,

Who gave them growth.

Milk, and eggs, and butter,

The good produce of our own flock,

There shall be no dearth in our land,

Nor in our dwelling.

In name of Michael of my love,

Who bequeathed to us the power,

With the blessing of the Lamb,

And of His Mother.

Please don’t be fooled. Nature is not a realm of scarcity. Rather, nature is superabundant. There is an excess of life on a farm and on this planet. Those who say otherwise in the rhetoric of scarcity are trying to sell you something: a kind of slavery.

Protein farmer? How about protean farmer.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

The Sophianic Jihad

In The Butlerian Jihad, part of the Dune series extended by Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, and Kevin J. Anderson, a future civilization calls for the destruction of all computers, thinking machines, and humanoid robots. This sensibility is succinctly articulated in the dictum “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” John Michael Greer draws on this idea in his book Our Retro Future: Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future, and, as I’ve written, I think his instincts are sharp and his arguments worthy of deep consideration. With the technocrats now in smug assurance of their absolute victory, now is the time to start thinking about our subservience to, especially, information technology and to the technocrats and their lackeys in government who think they control it—and by controlling it controlling us.

In fact, we have arrived at a nexus predicted long since. As Canadian philosopher George Grant, for example, wrote in the 1960s, “When one contemplates the conquest of nature by technology one must remember that that conquest had to include our own bodies.” [1] Facing the prospect of mandated and enforced medical procedures and the attendant “digital passports” now being developed and implemented, I’d say the technological conquest of the human person is set at full speed ahead.

I’m not surprised by any of this, and neither should anyone else be. I’ve been warning about it for years, for one thing. In my first published academic paper, 2005’s “Meditations on Blade Runner”(available as a pdf on the “Articles” page of my website), I speculated about the then half-illusory prospect of transhumanism, a project now fully applauded by The World Economic Forum and its subsidiaries and perhaps even by the Vatican. As one can tell from the parties with vested interests in this tranhumanist project (though cloaked under the disguises of “health” and “environmentalism”), this, as all conquests, is ultimately about power. As Grant writes,

“In North American science the motive of wonder becomes ever more subsidiary to the motive of power, and that those scientists still dominated by wonder have a more difficult time resisting the forces of power which press in upon them from without their community…. It is the growing victory of power over wonder which is the basis of the proposition that the modern sciences can best be understood as a unity around the idea of mastery.” [2]

I’ve written in most of my books about the regretful standard ethos of science since Francis Bacon and Descartes as an enterprise invested in exploitation and domination, not all that different from the psychological mindset of the rapist; and I’ve lamented the loss of an integral view of science represented in the hermetic scientists of the early modern period and Goethe’s delicate empiricism. How different would the world look had the brain power and investment of subsequent centuries been invested in a more human and integral science, a science not blind to the realm of the spirit? But it is not only the hard sciences that are complicit in the play of dominance and submission in human societies: the social sciences are just as implicated. Again Grant:

“It has become increasingly clear that the technological society requires not only the control of non-human nature, but actually the control of human nature. This is the chief cause of the development of the modern ‘value-free’ social sciences.” [3]

Certainly, the superabundance of psychological engineers of consent in government, media outlets, social media, and the pharmaceutical industry (to name only the most obvious) bears witness to the prostitution of almost an entire field of inquiry. I’d even go so far as to say (almost purely from personal observation) that it certainly seems that those most anxious about the “pandemic” also suffer from a variety of psychological co-morbidities. That’s how it works. Exploit the enemy’s weakness, humanity being the enemy in this case. How different the social sciences are now than they were in the age of Freud, Jung, Adler, Frankl and their contemporaries. So much of the human has been lost at the expense of the technocratic.

For my own part, what I propose is a kind of Sophianic Jihad, one where the human is elevated above the cold and calculating values of the technocratic. Indeed, I believe the technocrats fear this more than anything: a world where they are ignored and the illusion of their power evaporates like the digital froth it is. In the 1940s, Russian philosopher and prophet Nikolai Berdyaev speculated that “the day of modern history is over and that we are entering upon a period of darkness.” [4] I don’t think his timing was off. What we are living in is not the inauguration of the Age of Darkness, but its crisis point. Our civilization has lost all moorings to the Real—whether in terms of gender, or marriage, or of the Creation itself, no less than of human nature.

The technocrats and the technocratic, under the aegis of their unknown god, Ahriman, swallow up our natural and supernatural lives with their glittering distractions and alluring falsehoods promising immortality and a freedom that is anything but free.

What I am not advocating is a retreat into a kind of medieval paradise dreamt of by arm-chair distributists and cosplaying pseudo-Inklings. As Berdyaev writes, “A return the pre-industrial period of history is absolutely impossible. Medievalists like Carlyle and Ruskin [and I would add William Morris] turned to the past instead of looking forward, in spite of all the truth their criticisms contain: We are only able to go forward and we must.” [5] Greer himself only looks back so far as the Victorian age.

But, believe it or not, I am a futurist. I hold that the future—a human future—is a sophianic future. It is also the spiritual future, as it restores humanity to its rightful place in harmony with both the natural and supernatural realms. Anything else will fail. And we may have to experience a few failures before we figure this out. I may not be here to see it. Nevertheless, the time for the Sophianic Jihad has arrived.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. George Grant, Technology and Empire (House of Anansi Press, 1969), 27.

2. Ibid., 116.

3. Ibid., 118.

4. Nikolai Bedyaev, Towards a New Epoch (London, 1949), 39.

5. Ibid., 45.